With Kubernetes there is not much work need for the maintenance. Kubernetes is fault tolerant. It means that whenever you have some pods or nodes crashing, Kubernetes is the one responsible for run them back.

You can learn the basics of Kubernetes and save around 20-25% compare to use the same Docker Containers but with Cloud Run.

There is a minor cost for one Kubernetes cluster to be run on GCP, but it is negligible if you consider to have some heavy jobs.

GKE Autopilot[0] has been close to zero maintenance for us over the last few months (less than a week in total for a team with little previous Kubernetes experience). You also get a cluster controller for free so if you are using a single cluster, you are only paying for the resources of the containers running on top of it.

[0]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes...